Mary
Mary Mary is a character briefly introduced in The New Albion Guide to Analogue Consciousness, then reappears in The Grand Cyberpunk Gala of Gabriella Gadfly as the main antagonist. She is voiced by Jessica Singer. Biography The New Albion Guide to Analogue Consciousness When the Ark 1 arrived in Elysium and the Voodoopunks were set upon by the nightmarish ‘angels’ native to the dimension, Mary could do nothing but watch in horror as the creatures slaughtered her friends and family. Mary herself survived the encounter and went on to fight in the hopeless battle for survival alongside the remaining pilgrims and Blood Red Dogs throughout their twenty years of imprisonment. Her weapon of choice was a double-barreled gun, and she wore a totem necklace made from the scavenged bones of her dead husband and children. When Rachael and Mascot 3000 arrives in Elysium in the opera’s final act and offer the surviving pilgrims the choice between killing themselves against the Elysium Portal in order to reincarnate back in New Albion or upload themselves as analogue consciousness via Mascot 3000's MCG 3.14, Mary chooses the latter (offstage). The Room Beneath New Albion In the final act of The Room Beneath New Albion, an unnamed AI reveals to Alice what happened to Mary and the other AI pilgrims upon returning to New Albion. The city council had, out of fear of the AIs’ unnatural condition, locked them all inside a warehouse where they were kept in the dark until they managed to figure out a way to escape. The plan they concocted involved sending their consciousness back in time to find a suiting agent for the task of building a computer with a server powerful enough for the AIs to upload into, escaping the warehouse and the fidgety clutches of the city council. This server would be built in the past, and thus be ready for the AIs to safely upload to before the city council would have time to even learn they were up to anything. The agent the AIs chose for this vital task was the albino princess Alice. The AIs made her regularly ingest a dose of a certain “sandy drug”, which made it possible for them to move her through time and contact her telepathically with instructions on how to go about building the supercomputer. This supercomputer became the very “Room beneath New Albion”, built from stolen pieces of steampunk era Dolls. The drug Alice used to keep in contact with the AIs eventually killed her, but not before the AIs appeared to profess their undying gratitude and promising to protect Alice’s tribe in return for her saving them. In the song "They're Coming" it is implied that it's greatly due to the knowledge bestowed upon them by the AI cabal that the Albino tribe is able to dispatch of hostile approaches by the New Albion mafia and representatives of the authorities alike with such ease. Leading up to The Ballad of Lost Hollow By the time of the events of “The Ballad of Lost Hollow”, Mary and her fellow AIs had acquired significant knowledge and proficiency in traveling through time and other dimensions. They spent the time after the events of “The Room Beneath New Albion” exploring and testing these newfound abilities, now that their intelligence was no longer limited to organic human brains. During one of their time travels however, they came across a message from the future, which stated that once their fading memories of love and empathy (emotions being a trait they had lost along with their human bodies) are finally all forgotten, their future selves will begin exploring how to evolve even further and try to achieve some form of apotheosis as “post-physical” beings. This requires an enormous amount of energy, something that could only be achieved by the nuclear implosion of an entire city, say… New Albion. Upon learning this, Mary and the other AIs try and stop this grim future from taking place – but their own future selves are working against them, and they are propelled into a desperate war they cannot seem to win. Their future selves are able to foresee their every move, and through their advanced skills in time manipulation use inorganic means to “seal away” certain timelines in which it would be possible for the AIs of the past to prevail against them. After realizing it’s impossible for them to come up with a plan that their future selves can’t in turn guess and counter, Mary and the other AIs decide that the only way for them to save New Albion is through completely irrational means. During their years of interdimensional research and experimentation, the AIs have learned how to manipulate reality within the pocket dimension that is the Collective Unconscious. Their new plan involves creating a space in this pocket dimension and broadcasting it to the “real world” via a radio show. Theoretically, if enough people believes in it, it would grow and become real (manifesting physically in the true reality). The AIs would then enter this place via the Collective Unconscious, in which their psyches would be transferred from their physical robot bodies in the room beneath New Albion to be re-imagined in the CU as a physical reflection of their residual self-image. Theoretically, this would allow them to live on as the humans they used to be before uploading as AI all those years ago, regaining their ability to feel and empathize, and never devolve into the destructive AI monsters of their future. For this plan to work however, they needed a group of people other than themselves in the CU to build the reality around. This was where Han-Mi, Helen and Henry came in. Additionally, to add more unknown factors and unpredictability to their plan, the AIs later on decided to bring the Post-Human Lloyd Allen along on their project as a consultant. He’s the one who designed “Miss Helen’s Weird West Cabaret” after the AIs’ initial project in the CU, “The Grand Cyberpunk Gala of Gabriella Gadfly”, spun out of control and had to be terminated. Lloyd Allen is also tasked with including hidden elements in the Weird West narrative, to further secure the future AIs from predicting and responding to the timeline. The Grand Cyberpunk Gala of Gabriella Gadfly After Raven helps Helen escape the collective unconscious and get back to New Albion and the real world, Helen finds herself in the Room Beneath New Albion where she is turned face to face with Mary. Mary acts as a spokesperson on behalf of the AIs’ cabal, and she explains to Helen who they are and just how and why she and her fellow AIs decided to trap Helen and the others in the Collective Unconscious. She also tells her of the perceived consequences it would have on the fate of New Albion were Helen and her friends to break free. Despite Mary’s warnings however, Helen can’t bring herself to let the AIs send her and her friends back to their psychic prison in the CU. She kills herself, thereby severing the AIs’ link to the CU and letting Han-Mi and Henry back into the real world. Mary regrets how Helen’s death “screws everything up” for their plan to save New Albion, but reaches out to the two newcomers with the best apology her emotionless mind can come up with before ordering the other AIs to capture their two remaining cast members, wipe their minds, and send them back into the CU to continue where they left off. Before they manage to grab hold of them however, Han-Mi, fueled by the trauma of her girlfriend's suicide, uses her newfound post-human abilities to turn the tide of the struggle. She turns her friend Henry into Hurl, the superhuman “rage beast” alter ego he had while he existed within the CU. Hurl makes short work of Mary’s friends, but before he can get to her as well, Mary is able to incapacitate him with a beam from one of her lasers, knocking him out cold. Instead of taking up the fight with Han-Mi, Mary pleads with her to let her live. She tells the freshly flowered post-human of all the wonder she's seen during her decades as a disembodied psyche floating through our multilayered existence, and how life is too precious to waste. She apologizes for the sins she committed in her quest to save New Albion and asks that Han-Mi spares her life. Han-Mi realizes that she can’t bring herself to kill Mary, despite everything the AI had done to her and her friends. She decides to let Mary live on in the Collective Unconscious, taking Helen’s place in the town of Lost Hollow as the saloon’s hostess. Henry decides to come along and live together with Mary in the CU. Leg Debate Mary's AI form has been described as a metallic spider, a creature commonly known to have eight legs. However, on the cover art of The Grand Cyberpunk Gala of Gabriella Gadfly she is depicted as only having six legs. This has caused much debate among the fandom as to what is the true number of legs that Mary has. When this question was posed to Paul Shapera, he replied that the appearances of his characters are not dictated by him, they are determined by the cover artist. Following this, the official statement made by Sarah DeBuck was that Mary has ten legs, accompanied by an edited version of the album cover. at the Cabaret]] At The New Albion Cabaret, the costume worn by Jessica Singer was designed to preserve this ambiguity. Her outfit had six attached legs, which is eight total legs if including her real legs, and ten total appendages if including both her real legs and her arms. Between song performances, the performers inserted a bit of dialogue about Mary's enigmatic number of legs. Trivia Mary was a very young mother and married straight out of High School, as was the norm for conservative young voodoopunk girls of the atompunk era. She had her first child that same year, with the other two coming in rapid succession. Hank Hernandez was her husband’s best man at their wedding. Mary was a very devout follower of the voodoopunk faith and had been massively involved in taking care of the cult’s preparations prior to their pilgrimage to Elysium. She was not, however, directly involved with Arcadia Corp. Mary and the other surviving voodoopunk pilgrims were suffering from PTSD after their twenty years getting constantly assaulted by the horrors of Elysium. Sometime after Mary left her metal body behind to live in the CU, the forgotten Meme winds up inside a piece of her derelict spiderbot avatar. This leads to the Meme gaining consciousness, and eventually piecing together a little body for herself from the remains of discarded AI bodies.